New York|Steven Banks Was Hired to Stem New York’s Homelessness Crisis. It Didn’t Happen.

Supported by

Steven Banks Was Hired to Stem New York’s Homelessness Crisis. It Didn’t Happen.

Image

Protesters outside a Holiday Inn Express in Queens where New York City planned to place homeless people. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration appears to have underestimated the backlash such a move would provoke.CreditCreditChristian Hansen for The New York Times

But since the shake-up that put Mr. Banks at the helm of the city’s efforts to combat a rise in homelessness, the shelter population has continued to climb. He has been criticized not only by those predictably opposed to plans for new shelters, but also by onetime colleagues whom he still courts as allies.

Civic associations in Maspeth and other parts of Queens chartered buses last month to stage a boisterous protest in front of Mr. Banks’s Brooklyn home, returning to demonstrate there again on Oct. 15. They are angry that homeless people are being given hotel beds in their communities.

The Legal Aid Society, where Mr. Banks was once attorney in chief, has taken issue with an intake process that requires homeless parents to bring their children along when applying for shelter, forcing the children to miss school, and has accused the city of discriminating against homeless people with disabilities.

And a report issued by the Independent Budget Office this month found that among public school students who lived in shelters during the 2013-14 school year, almost a third missed more than 20 days of school, while another third missed more than 40 days.

Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley, a Democrat who represents Maspeth, has criticized the de Blasio administration for its handling of the homeless crisis. She said Mr. Banks, who, as commissioner of the Department of Social Services, oversees both homeless services and the Human Resources Administration, was juggling too much. “He is well intentioned but completely overwhelmed,” Ms. Crowley said.

Speaking to a civic group on Thursday, Christine C. Quinn, the former City Council speaker and an unsuccessful mayoral candidate in 2013, put responsibility for the problem squarely on Mr. de Blasio, a fellow Democrat. “Our city is hurting in the face of this crisis, and the truth is people don’t think it’s getting any better because it’s not,” said Ms. Quinn, who now leads a nonprofit provider of shelters for families with children. “They’re aching for the mayor to stand up and lead on this issue.”

For Mr. de Blasio, the relentless demand that shelter capacity be increased and the broader criticism of his administration on the issue of homelessness reflect the limitations of the mayor’s liberal agenda in a city where economic inequality has deepened over many years, not least in the housing market.

Mr. de Blasio’s larger vision has given way to more pragmatic considerations — not only on housing and homelessness, but also on policing and criminal justice reform, key pillars of his mayoral campaign. The turnabout has been especially striking given that he has styled himself as a national leader while seeking to put New York at the vanguard of a new liberal movement.

High rents and a dearth of housing affordable to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers have created a complicated reality for Mr. de Blasio, and for Mr. Banks. Three years into the mayor’s term, the number of people living in shelters overseen by the homeless services agency has swelled to about 60,000 from about 51,000.

So it is that Mr. Banks, who was a needle in the city’s side for years on the issue of homelessness, must now adhere to rules he helped shape from the outside, while facing criticism he might once have directed at others.

“It’s one of those things,” he said in an interview this month. “If you do home repair and you rip open the walls, you discover other problems that you didn’t anticipate.” Of the challenge involved in reforming the homeless services agency, he added, “We’ve proceeded to address a lot of longstanding problems at the same time, which leaves us open for criticism if everything isn’t fixed at once.”

Mr. Banks, 59, was in his 20s when he began waging a legal fight to force the city to uphold a “right to shelter” under the State Constitution, obligating New York to provide temporary housing to anyone who entered an intake center and asked for it. It is an entitlement that puts extraordinary pressure on the shelter system he now oversees.

Image

Steven Banks, the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, oversees both homeless services and the Human Resources Administration. Since the shake-up that put Mr. Banks at the helm of the city’s efforts to combat a rise in homelessness, the shelter population has continued to climb.CreditJohn Taggart for The New York Times

Nowhere is the contradiction between Mr. Banks’s past and present more apparent than in the city’s growing use of budget hotels to house homeless people, a practice city officials say they would like to end. There are now 6,100 homeless people living in hotels, up from 2,600 in February.

For decades, using hotels as shelters has been widely seen as a desperate, sometimes dangerous, stopgap: It is expensive, and the hotels are neither designed to function as shelters nor have adequate security to protect residents. In February, a 26-year-old homeless woman and two of her three children were fatally stabbed while staying at a Ramada Inn on Staten Island where the city had placed them. Her boyfriend was charged with three counts of murder; he has pleaded not guilty.

The administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, also used hotels as shelters in the 1990s. At the time, Mr. Banks was among those who joined an outcry against the practice. He said then that “the folly of the administration’s policy is that it is spending $3,000 a month on places like the Kennedy Inn when it could redirect the funds to permanent housing.”

The city pays regular rates for rooms, and remodels entire hotels into shelters under long-term contracts. Such hotels are typically in isolated areas and have high vacancy rates; their owners often see the conversions as guaranteeing profits.

That is how the city ended up focusing on a Holiday Inn Express in Maspeth. But the de Blasio administration appears to have underestimated the backlash such a move would provoke in the neighborhood, long known for a level of civic engagement that can turn combative.

Resistance to the idea did grow heated. Mr. Banks received a phone call at his home about the plan that he felt was so threatening he reported it to the police. He was also booed at packed community meetings where audience members turned their backs on him.

Elected officials in Queens filed a lawsuit to prevent the hotel from being converted to a shelter; they argued that a city law required each unit to have cooking facilities. Mr. Banks championed the law in the 1990s in a bid to end the city’s use of “welfare hotels.”

In an interview, Mr. Banks said the law applied only to families with children, and that plans called for the Holiday Inn Express to house adult families. Asked whether adult families needed to be able to cook, Mr. Banks said, “not under the law.”

On Oct. 11, Mr. Banks said that the city had abandoned plans to convert the hotel to a shelter because the owner refused. Instead, 30 homeless men were placed in rooms there at a regular guest rate of $160 a night.

The shift does not appear to have mollified Maspeth residents.

“We have a history of fighting back and never letting go,” said Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association and an organizer of the rallies.

The dispute is a blow to the de Blasio administration as it tries to meet what Mr. Banks calls the city’s “moral and legal obligation” to house homeless people.

The administration, mindful that it is losing in terms of both the numbers and the politics of homelessness, is defending its approach with a social media campaign of videos showing those on both sides of the issue. One juxtaposes images of a demonstration outside a Queens hotel where homeless families are living against an interview with a single mother staying there with her infant. Protesters can be heard chanting, “White lives matter.”

The videos have antagonized local residents who feel ignored and are engaging in an “extreme act of civil disobedience,” said Gail Nayowith, a longtime advocate for children who has led nonprofits focused on poor children and those in foster care.

She said the de Blasio administration appeared to be fighting the wrong fight. “We agree that homeless people need access to permanent housing,” she said. “I don’t see any of that. What I see are these advertisements that polarize the community.”

Ms. Nayowith said commercial hotels were a poor solution, even if temporary, and she lamented what she saw as a clear reversal by Mr. Banks. “Hotels are not places for children to grow up in,” she said. “He knows better.”

Correction:

An article last Wednesday about New York City’s homeless crisis referred incorrectly to the city’s temporary housing obligation. New York City is the only city in the state — not in the country — required by court order to provide temporary housing.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Homeless Crisis Stymies Official Hired to Halt It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe